Reno was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1959, and grew up in Towson, Maryland. A graduate of Towson High School in 1978, after a year living in his tent in Yosemite Valley, he attended Haverford College, allow a B.A. in 1983. He enter postgraduate muse at Yale University in the Department of Religious Studies in 1984 and effected his doctoral degree in 1990 in the range of religious ethics. While in postgraduate school he met and married Juliana Miller, with whom he has had two children, Rachel (born 1990) and Jesse (born 1992). He accept his first power appointment at Creighton University in 1990, where he taught until 2010 when he took an extended platonist leaving to work full-delay at First Things.
